There are good and bad online instructional platforms for everything: some language courses work better than others and some approaches to teaching music are more effective than others.

This is just as true for computer programming, where, like everything else, an abundance of free courses and tutorials from MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard and Stanford offer interactive tools for learning web development and computer programming. You can find a long list of free comp sci courses from these great universities here.

One new site that is getting particularly good reviews is Codecademy, a free online learning system for learning everything from HTML Basics to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tutorials to design projects of their own choosing. It’s also easy to track your progress.

What sets Codecademy apart from other programming tutorials is that all student work can be completed within a web browser. No software downloading or installing is required. Responding to criticism that the site didn't initially offer enough courses, Codecademy has added numerous courses in 2012 and launched a Course Creator program. This is a boon for users interested in learning how to teach. Codecademy does not put user-created courses through an approval process and gives course creators a link that they can distribute as they wish. Codecademy does, however, screen the courses and selects which to feature on its own site.

Enrollees in its Code Year program receive a programming lesson in their email inbox every Monday, starting with the fundamentals of JavaScript and then moving on to HTML and CSS. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up at the beginning of the year (including the White House and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg). If you were one the enrollees, it’s still not too late to keep that New Year's resolution.

Comments (8)

another great free coding website to go along with codecademy is CodeAvengers.com … codeavengers is being used in New Zealand high schools as part of the new computer science high school curriculum. So its tailored to young people…i personally like codecademy too!

Great Call! I’ve been doing CodeAcademy for like 3 months, and I hit 500 points a couple days ago. I’ve finished their Javascript module and almost all the Web module. They recently added modules in python and ruby. Great website.

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.